It was only a matter of time before Amazon outgrew their old tab navigation system. They have just launched a new design which maximises the screen real estate while retaining a lot of what customers are familiar with.
The main changes appear to be the navigation where they have used a more traditional left navigation which works well. The navigation minimizes once in a specific section and is revealed by a rollover ensuring they have as much screen real estate as possible. They have obviously done extensive usability testing and conducted a thorough customer-centred design process.
“We consulted the foremost experts in the field: our customers.
We travelled around the world, inviting customers like you to come and try out the new features and design. We listened to their feedback and made changes based on their opinions. Then we asked more customers for their advice, and we made more changes from their feedback. The design you see today reflects the input of many real-life customers of our UK and international websites.”
Overall they appear to have done a great job and I’m really pleased to see that they have continued to offer a good customer experience by understanding what their customers’ goals are. They say that after speaking to their customers they found the four most important customer goals were shopping, searching, saving and buying, so they made those areas a priority. After having a good look around though, I don’t see any big changes which would improve my experience in these four areas so I can only assume that they made minor tweaks as they felt that those areas worked well as is.
Teams which follow a thorough customer-centred design process on their website can be confident that when they launch their new site, customers will continue to have a good customer experience. In our eyes it’s no longer a nice to have, it is an essential part of a website redesign process. How confident are you that your web team will follow a customer-centred design process?
